Sam Leith - The Coincidence Engine

The old man was running a thumb down a paper register on an old clipboard. ‘You can leave a message. Maybe he shows up,’ he said, evidently moved to compassion by Sherman’s affecting story. ‘I’d sure hate for him to miss his momma’s funeral.’

They had briefly entertained the idea of leaving a message at the first place that had offered them the option. But it seemed more likely to do harm than good. If he was deliberately moving about, he’d be unlikely to return to somewhere he’d been. And if he’d been there, or was there, under a false name, he wouldn’t like finding a message under his real name. And if he hadn’t been there he’d like finding a message for him even less. Whichever way you looked at it, he seemed unlikely to call an unknown number and arrange to meet even a kindly-sounding stranger in a non-public place in order to be robbed.

But Davidoff – who was lazy and irritable – wasn’t giving up. They stepped a little bit away from the clerk’s window.

‘How about: you’ve won the lottery, call this number?’ the bigger man suggested, pulling the sweaty patch on the front of his T-shirt away from his skin.

‘Davidoff, of all the bad ideas you’ve had in your long career of having bad ideas, that is the most idiotic.’

‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘I’d call the number if I got that message.’

Sherman had let that hang in the air as its own reproach.

Davidoff thought for a bit longer. Then he said: ‘No ticket.’

‘No ticket,’ said Sherman. ‘No ticket. No American citizenship. No reason for the Georgia state lottery ever to have heard of him. Mind you, he does have a machine that wins lotteries.’

‘No way,’ said Davidoff.

‘Don’t pretend not to remember,’ Sherman said. ‘You were there when we were briefed. Didn’t Ellis say that in the early days, when they’d sent two experienced people after this thing, both of them won the lottery within a week of each other and instantly quit the company? Real problem. They thought it was the machine doing it.’

Davidoff turned his palms upwards and smiled at the memory. ‘Yeah. That’s why winning the lottery was on my mind,’ he admitted. Then, looking at his feet: ‘I spent two hundred pounds on tickets.’

Sherman wasn’t going to share with his partner that the same idea had occurred to him, at least briefly, before being dismissed. I mean, what if this thing really was that powerful? He’d conceived the suspicion that Ellis somehow wanted them to believe the story about the lottery winners, or at least know it. But if this magic device really did keep evading pursuit by making its pursuers so rich they gave up the chase, he didn’t imagine that Ellis would have assigned them to the task of hunting it down with quite such obvious relish.

No. Ellis had probably not been telling them the whole truth. It seemed far more likely, he reflected, that this probability machine had decided to change tack and start putting its pursuers off by, for instance, having them be hit by a meteorite, eat a Snickers bar infested with MRSA, or suffer a plague of agonising boils. It might bend the very laws of probability around it… but that was no reason to think it would necessarily be nice. If you could choose carrot or stick, you’d choose stick, wouldn’t you? Every time.

As he went over these speculations in his head, it occurred to Sherman that he’d started thinking oddly. He had used the word ‘decided’ of a piece of inanimate technology. He’d cast himself as its ‘enemy’, come to that. He’d started to think of this machine itself almost as a person: as if it, rather than the guy carrying it, was the one making the decisions. He had started to acquire the paranoid impression that this fugitive piece of property might not want to be recovered.

‘Two hundred pounds?’ he said. ‘You muppet. Did you win?’

‘Three numbers. A tenner.’

‘Unlucky.’

‘Yes. No note then?’

‘No note, lad. Now. Have we gone through all the motels?’

Davidoff looked at the page they’d torn from the phone directory.

‘Yup.’

Something nagged at Sherman. ‘Davidoff?’

‘Yup.’

‘Did we try our own motel?’

Davidoff let his jaw hang open for a moment while he considered the proposition.

‘No,’ he said at length. ‘We didn’t.’

‘Well, shall we go back and have a look, then?’

It took them thirty-five minutes to drive back to the Hazy Rest Motor Inn through rush-hour traffic.

The adenoidal kid in the faded Skynyrd T-shirt was back manning the office. Sherman noticed that the boy had painted his fingernails black. They offered, by now with more briskness than conviction, their line about why they were trying to find out whether there was an Alex Smart in the motel.

‘Aren’t you the guys in room 9?’

‘Yes,’ Sherman said.

‘Here y’go. Yeah. Yeah. He was here. English dude, yeah? I thought you were like together or something. Two doors down in room 7.’

He shuffled the register round so Sherman could read it.

Alex Smart. Checked out late that morning. They’d probably passed each other on the balcony.

They thanked the clerk and went back to the car where Davidoff had parked it across two spaces at an angle. They sat back down and Sherman thought for a while.

‘What are the chances of that happening?’ Davidoff asked. He put his sunglasses on and looked out of the window. Sherman thought he was probably admiring himself in the reflection. Something occurred to Sherman.

‘Car hire companies,’ he said.

‘Can’t we check them online?’ Davidoff grunted. ‘And get some lunch while we’re at it?’

‘No,’ said Sherman. ‘Most of them are at the airport. He’s only got a few hours on us at the moment, but by the time we finish buggering about on the Internet he’ll be long gone and they’ll all be shut. Let’s go.’

Davidoff sighed, turned the key, and wheeled round the car park just over-fast enough, and stopped at the junction with the highway just over-abruptly enough, to signal his exasperation.

They made good time. Twenty minutes later the two men were at the Hertz office in a Portakabin in the airport rental car park. They joined the queue behind a tall kid wearing a rucksack, Davidoff tapping his feet impatiently, Sherman looking about him, sucking his teeth, wondering the best line to spin the clerk… Conversational was what was needed, he thought. A bit of finesse. Use the English accent. Something about a stag party that got separated… phone not working in America… groom in danger of not making it to the church on time. That might – well, that or something like…

‘Smart,’ said an English voice, and Sherman’s awareness returned to the room. ‘S-M-A-R-T. Yes. As in clever.’

Well, I’ll be, Sherman thought. The boy in front of him in the queue pushed a British passport and driving licence across the counter. The woman smiled indulgently but professionally. Sherman risked a slight craning of the neck. Yes. Come to think of it, he did look vaguely familiar from the motel.

Davidoff wasn’t paying any attention. Sherman gently put finger and thumb around the bones of his elbow and dug the tips in harder than was necessary.

Davidoff hissed something and his head whipped round. He looked at Sherman crossly. The kid in front didn’t notice. Sherman made his face tense and looked at the boy’s back. Davidoff cottoned on. He blinked and frowned.

‘All right, Mr Smart, you need to sign here -’ she circled something quickly with her biro – ‘and here and here -’ a couple of dashed crosses. The boy cocked his head, started scribbling.

‘Here are your keys. The car’s a silver Pontiac, mid-size. It’s in space number 137, row 8. Remember to return it full.’